How Craig Newmark Built Craigslist With “No Vision Whatsoever”

Photo: AP/Stephen Chernin

Craig Newmark started craigslist in early 1995 as a way of staying on top of San Francisco’s busy arts and technology scene. Despite (or perhaps because of) the site’s determined non-commercialism, craigslist survived and even thrived in the post-dot-com days. Now 20 million people visit the site each month, viewing and self-publishing more than 17 million ads and forum posts. With characteristic modesty, Newmark continues to refer himself not as a founder but as a "customer service representative."

In this podcast, Newmark and David Weinberger, author of Everything Is Miscellaneous, discuss craigslist’s unstructured approach to managing the site’s growth and its features, and what that might mean for planning and strategizing in other areas of business. The old structures of control just don’t work. Given the steady success of craigslist, what does?

This podcast interview is the sixth in a series of interviews by Weinberger, sponsored by Wired News and the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
You can use the player below to listen to the interview. Or, for a downloadable MP3 file and full transcript, continue reading.

David Weinberger:
Hello. This is David Weinberger. Welcome to the "Everything is
Miscellaneous" podcast series, brought to you by the Harvard Burkman
Center For the Internet and Society, and "Wired." Hi Craig, it’s David.

Craig Newmark:

Hey David, how are you doing? I’m well, how are you?

David:

Well, other than the dentist trip you have tomorrow, you’re doing fine.

Craig:

That’s exactly how I feel.

David:

What’s good about that is that everything has to be more pleasant than that, including this conversation.

Craig:

That’s true.

David:
So I have some questions. When you started Craigslist, it’s become something so astounding, what did you think you were starting when you started it?

Craig:
When I started it, all I thought I was giving a little bit back to the community. Other people were doing a lot more. And I had no idea that this would become a thing of some small significance. It was just a little hobby and the only difference between a little hobby and what we have now is that we follow through.

David:
Well that’s exactly what I’m interested in. So when you started your little hobby in giving a little back to the web, and you are famous as a modest person, was it simply going to be a classified ad site? Did you think it might become something more or what did you have in mind?

Craig:
When I started, I had nothing in mind more than telling people about arts and technology events in San Francisco. Pretty much everything on the site is based on user feedback. Frankly, I have no vision whatsoever.

[laughter]

David:
All right, so Craigslist goes from this little gift, very unambitious it seems, at least you didn’t have great ambitions for it, to something that has not only become large within its category, but something that means a lot to people, which is one of the most surprising and heartening things about it. I mean, people are really attached to it.
Communities have grown out of classified ads and events listings.

Craig:
Yeah. Somehow we’ve worked with people in the community to build an online community. We’re not certain how it happened, except that we really do listen to people. We try to treat people like we want to be treated, and somehow we built a culture of trust.

David:
So some people, when they build a business, they start with a business plan, and they have, even if the business plan doesn’t go exactly, nevertheless at every moment they are in charge, they are charge of their destiny, they are shaping events. This does not seem exactly to be the Craigslist strategy.

Craig:
No, in our case, we built something, we get feedback, well we try to figure out what make sense out of the suggestions, and then we do something about it and then we listen some more.

David:
Here’s the question I really want to ask you. Because of your modesty, this may be difficult for you, but I’m going to push ahead anyway. You are famously and justly noted for a humility that’s just really remarkable and quite rare and becomes even rarer as the size and importance of what you built has grown. So the question I want to ask you is, how important do you think that sense of modesty is to the success of Craigslist?

Craig:
I don’t think that it’s a sense of modesty, I just think it’s being realistic. We’re doing a job, we’re doing it well, but there’s always more to be done. Maybe that does matter to people, but the focus is on what’s next. For example, spammers and scammers do go after us, and we’ve got to stop them all.

David:

How do you figure out to stop them all, or even any of them?

Craig:
Well, about stopping them all we don’t know. Over time we get smarter and smarter about figuring out how to stop them, and we’re working on some technology right now to get a little better at it. We won’t talk about it. Then we’ll see how well that works, and then we’ll get smarter from there, and just keep going as long as it takes.

David:
So despite what most business advisors and consultants tell their clients, it seems that much of your success, and Craigslist success, has come about through a series of small steps, maybe not knowing exactly where the next 15, 20 big steps are going to be taking you? Is that fair?

Craig:
Pretty much so, from the very beginning we had the blessing of very limited resources, which meant we couldn’t do fancy stuff that we thought might be good, most of which turned out to be not so good ideas. So instead, we just progressed in small increments. We progress a little on the slow side, which may mean we lose some opportunity. But we respond to real needs and try to do real well in terms of helping out people, that seems to work. I guess I remember someone saying that markets are conversations, and they were right.

David:

It’s just a slogan, it doesn’t mean anything.

Craig:

I don’t know what happened to those guys, either.

David:

Well, you know, they never built anything like Craigslist. I will tell you that.

Craig:

Maybe they’re influence was much bigger. We see it in a number of places, including Wikipedia.

David:

What do you see as the point of similarity between Wikipedia and Craigslist?

Craig:
The big similarity is that both sites are built by the people who use them. Both have a culture of trust, and both are part of an historic trend where power is flowing from small groups of powerful people to much larger, but still small, groups of people. Both sites, like a lot of others, suffer from the same problem of being attacked by disinformation professionals and that’s an ongoing problem everywhere.

David:
Classified ads obviously are the meat and potatoes, as a vegetarian, I should find another metaphor, the meat and potatoes of the newspaper industry. And you’ve been interested in another aspect of the newspaper industry as well, in journalism and citizen journalism. Do you see that as something that could possibly grow out of Craigslist that is growing out of Craigslist?

Craig:
In part, my interest in the press grows out of my customer service role in Craigslist. I do full-time customer service and I do see a lot of scams and disinformation, particularly scams coming out of Washington.
And I figure the only way people have to protect themselves against that are better informed people. And that way we can get our representatives to deal with these big scams.

So, my interests, in part arise from that customer service/law enforcement role, than this is a citizen-independent act. I’ve read since high school that a free press is responsible for a lot of the checks and balances on our government and given the constitutional crisis we’re undergoing right now we really need much better governance.

So that’s why I’m helping people who are much smarter than me with their new experiments in journalism, including things like the Sunlight
Foundation, the Center for Citizens’ Media, Newstrust, Day Life, that kind of thing.

David:
So, the connection for you is not so much the citizen ownership of this, as it is the crime-busting role that you play in keeping
Craigslist useful?

Craig:
Well, it’s kind of both. Well, let’s say crime busting on a small limited level. But it’s also thinking, I guess, as a citizen just trying to be a stand-up guy going after the bigger issue. Just to be clear, I don’t think I’m Batman, I’m much more like an aggressive crime dog.

David:
[laughs] A thing that I find really interesting about Craigslist and other phenomena that emerge in ways that people don’t expect and I don’t think anybody can anticipate. Would you agree that that’s true of
Craigslist?

Craig:
It’s completely true of Craigslist in a sense where it’s completely about unattended consequences in a very positive say. I just started this half-assed events list and it’s grown into something bigger. We get attacked sometimes in ways that no one anticipated, like different kinds of spamming and we just plug ahead getting things done.

David:
So, if Craigslist is about unintended consequences, then how does somebody learn from the experience of Craigslist from its unintended success, so to speak?

Craig:
All I can do is suggest people could return to basics, in the sense that our site is about meeting people’s every day, real needs, like getting a place to live or a job. We operate in a culture of trust and a lot of that has to do with our core values, like treating people like you want to be treated. That means being serious about customer service and listening and following through.

The way people talk about those values a great deal. That is, we’re trying really hard to follow through on that.

David:
So a lot of companies say that sort of thing and some of them actually do it. But they do it in the service of intended consequences and they don’t achieve the remarkable success, not just as a business, but as a force for good in the world that Craigslist has.

So, there’s some other element to this, which I’m guessing is in fact, the appreciating of unattended consequences; the allowing of them to happen.

Craig:
Well, in our case, a big part of our strategy is to get out of the way when something good happens. The best example has to do with people who responded to the Hurricane Katrina disaster by starting to re-purpose our New Orleans site to use it to help people get in contact with survivors or survivors to get into contact with loved ones.

And then, people started using our site to offer housing and, later on, jobs to survivors. The idea there is that that was great stuff. We got out of the way of people doing that. We didn’t care that people were doing different things on the site. So, the idea sometimes, is you’ve got to know when to get out of the way.

David:

Thanks so much and thanks for being Craig and for doing Craigslist and for talking with me today.

Craig:

Hey, thanks. It’s my pleasure.

David:
That was Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist. And this is David
Weinberger, I’m a fellow at Harvard’s Burkman Center for Internet and
Society and the author of "Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder."

Thanks to the Berkman Center, and to Wired for making this podcast series possible. To hear other podcasts in the series, go to the "Wired" blog epicenter at blog.wired.com/business.

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